John Cochrane vs. Financial Intermediation

He writes,

just why is it so vital to save a financial system soaked in run-prone overnight debt? Even if borrowers might have to pay 50 basis points more (which I doubt), is that worth a continual series of crises, 10% or more downsteps in GDP, 10 million losing their jobs in the US alone, a 40% rise in debt to GDP, and the strangling cost of our financial regulations?

My take:

1. As I have said before (scroll down to lecture 9), the nonfinancial sector likes to hold riskless, short-term assets and issue risky, long-term liabilities. Financial intermediaries emerge to take the other side.

2. When governments run deficits, they need help from banks, which hold government debt. It used to be that governments ran deficits to finance wars. Now they run deficits routinely.

3. Banks have an easier time convincing customers that bank liabilities (i.e., the funds customers hold on deposit) are riskless if government will provide implicit or explicit guarantees.

From (2) and (3), we see that banks and government are co-dependent. This co-dependency makes it unlikely that we will find a free-market banking system.

We can expect government policy to be ambivalent with respect to the financial sector. On the one hand, it wants the financial sector to thrive, so that deficits can be financed and the economy has plenty of credit available. That argues for lots of guarantees with limited regulation. On the other hand, it wants to restrain the moral hazard that leads banks to take on too much risk and make the system prone to crises. That argues for limited guarantees and lots of regulation.

Policy makers do not deal rationally with this ambivalence. Instead, over time both guarantees and regulation tend to increase. For instance, in the wake of the financial crisis the government has extended both its guarantees (money market funds) and its regulation (non-banks that are “systemically important”). It is true that some types of financial regulation, such as restrictions on interstate banking, interest-rate ceilings, or other anti-competitive rules, have declined over time. But in the area of safety and soundness regulation, over the years the effort has been to make regulation more sophisticated and effective. That this has not been successful is due in part to the greater prevalence of guarantees and also to what I call the regulator’s calculation problem.

Taming the Financial Sector

Luigi Zingales writes,

there is precious little evidence that shows the positive role of other forms of financial development, particularly important in the United States: equity market, junk bond market, option and future markets, interest rate swaps, etc.

Found by Timothy Taylor.

Many financial practices are designed to evade regulations or optimize with respect to them. If regulators had not been so laggard in removing the interest rate ceilings on bank deposits, we might never have seen money market funds. If interstate banking had not been so restricted in the 1960s and 1970s, then there would have been no need for a mortgage securities market. If there were fewer short-sale restrictions and looser margin requirements in the stock market, then futures and options in the stock market might not have been created. My guess is that if you were to examine why firms use junk bonds rather than equity finance, you would find a regulatory story there as well.

Back in the early 1990s, someone coined the expression, “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Financial markets attempt to do the same with regulation.

Do I Heart Elizabeth Warren?

Simon Johnson writes,

Senator Warren puts forward two main sets of proposals. The first is to more strongly discourage the deception of customers. This is hard to argue against. Some parts of the financial sector are well-run, providing essential services at reasonable prices and with sound ethics throughout. Other parts of finance have drifted, frankly, into deceiving people – on fees, on risks, on terms and conditions – as a primary source of profits. We don’t allow this kind of cheating in the non-financial sector and we shouldn’t allow it in finance either.

…The second proposal is to end the greatest cheat of all – the implicit subsidies received by the largest financial institutions, structured so as to encourage excessive and irresponsible risk-taking. These consequences of these subsidies have already caused massive macroeconomic damage – this is why our crisis in 2008-09 was so severe and the recovery so slow. Yet we have made painfully little progress towards really ending the problems associated with some very large financial firms – and their debts – being viewed by markets and policymakers as being too big to fail.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

It may seem surprising that I agree with Senator Warren on both of these points. However, I disagree that the Consumer Financial Protection Board is taking the best approach to solving the problem of skilled financial firms exploiting less-skilled consumers. As I wrote here,

Regulated industries are always ready to complain about the cost of complying with bright-line regulations. However, I have the opposite objection. Particularly when it comes to the financial sector, compliance with BLR is far too easy. The bankers are always able to outmaneuver the regulators, staying within the letter of the rules while mocking their spirit.

That essay is where I proposed principles-based regulation as an alternative.

Does More Government Debt Reduce Interest Rates?

This is a random idea that is almost surely wrong. And if it is wrong, it will be wrong in a way that seems obviously stupid. So don’t expect me to stick with it.

Without blaming Nick Rowe, I started thinking about this when he wrote,

By “secular stagnation” I mean “declining equilibrium real interest rates”.

Most explanations of secular stagnation say it is caused by a rising desire to save and/or a falling investment demand. Call this the “Saving/Investment Hypothesis”.

But there are lots of different real interest rates. For example, the real interest rate on Bank of Canada currency is around minus 2%. (That currency pays 0% nominal interest, and the Bank of Canada targets 2% inflation). But people are willing to hold currency, despite that, because it is very liquid. But all assets differ in their liquidity. More liquid assets will have a lower real yield than less liquid assets. And if an asset becomes more liquid over time, its real yield will fall over time.

What if there is a sharp rise in the supply of government debt? The standard view is that this tends to raise interest rates, as debt absorbs more savings.

The alternative view I am putting out there is that government debt offers liquidity (in the limiting case, think of it as a very close substitute for money). If the supply of liquidity goes up, then there is less demand for banks to manufacture liquidity out of risky assets. The public wants fewer deposits backed by loans on fruit trees and instead is happy to hold mutual funds containing government bonds.

The result is fewer fruit trees planted. We would observe a decline in interest rates on low-risk assets and an increase in interest rates (or a loss of credit availability altogether) for risky investment projects.

Think of this as government debt crowding out private investment, even though the interest rate on safe assets, particularly government debt itself, can remain low and perhaps even fall as the crowding out gets larger. Again, this is probably wrong.

Relate this to Tobin’s q

Justin Fox reported,

>Ocean Tomo calculates intangible assets simply “by subtracting the tangible book value from the market capitalization of a given company or index,” so the rise in intangibles since the 1970s is in part just a reflection of rising stock market valuations. But that’s not all it is: the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen about 2 1/2 times since 1975, while the intangibles increase has been almost fivefold.

Tobin’s q is the ratio of the stock price to the replacement cost of capital. I am tempted to write:

q = P/K = (P/E)(E/K), where P is the stock price, E is earnings, and K is capital.

As Fox points out, a fair amount of the rise in q since the late 1970s comes from a higher P/E ratio. But I gather that if you think of K as tangible capital, then E/K also has soared.

Fox’s piece was mentioned in Scott Sumner’s discussion of what I called the fifth force. But Robin Hanson got me to take a look.

I would note that intangibles in the economy include not just firm-specific intangibles but also general intangibles that lead to better patterns of specialization and trade. Institutional improvements in India and China, as well as lower transportation and communication costs, come to mind.

Tyler Cowen has much more, including a hypothesis that accounting issues are involved.

Questions for Mark Thoma

He writes,

Surprisingly, the loss of more than 800 independent banks wasn’t due to an unusually large number of bank exits during the financial crisis. Instead, it was due to a fall in bank entries, from around 100 new banks per year prior to the Great Recession to just three per year on average since 2010 (only four new banks appeared from 2011 to 2013).

1. Does too-big-to-fail play a role in this, by making it hard for smaller banks to compete? Are some conservative (e.g., Peter Wallison) complaints about Dodd-Frank reinforcing TBTF possibly valid?

2. Does the causality run the other way? That is, have business formation rates been low, and this reduces the demand for services of small banks?

These are genuine questions, not rhetorical ones–my inclination is to believe Thoma’s story. I do not know if it is possible to find data that would answer these questions, but I think that searching for answers could be interesting.

Hormones and Financial Intermediation

A recent post reminded me that Jason Collins really liked The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust, by John Coates. Coates looks at how hormones are activated in traders. My guess is that I will get as much from Jason’s review as I would from the book. Jason writes,

In a bull market, testosterone surges through the population of traders. Each takes larger and larger risks, pushing markets to new highs and triggering further cascades of testosterone. Irrational exuberance has a chemical base.

Read the whole review. I would like to see the link between an individual short-term hormonal response and broad, long-term market trends established.

I do believe that there are cycles of financial intermediation. Remember how I think of financial intermediation. Households and businesses want to hold riskless, short-term assets while issuing risky, long-term liabilities. Financial intermediaries accommodate this by doing the opposite. When there is too little financial intermediation, opportunities to take reasonable risks are foregone. When there is too much financial intermediation, there is excessive risk-taking.

To a first approximation, I am not sure that simple trading of financial assets should boost testosterone on net, because financial trading is not positive sum. It’s not like “you want meat and I want shoes, so I’ll trade you meat for shoes.” Financial trading is closer to zero sum, which is why when you win you get high. The guy who sold you that stock that went up 5 points right after you bought it probably feels badly. So why should a bull market make more people feel high? Perhaps because as share prices increase, net financial intermediation is going up overall. That is, there are more short-term, low-risk liabilities being backed by more long-term, high-risk assets. Maybe that increased financial intermediation is accompanied by and reinforced by a hormonal response. Perhaps that is plausible, but it seems to me to require more of a stretch and, above all, more of a story of how markets react in the aggregate, or how System 2 and System 1 interact over long periods of time and across an entire array of market individuals and institutional relationships.

Charles A.E. Goodhart Does Not Heart SPOE

He writes,

there is no doubt that it is a clever and subtle idea. But there is no account of what might happen after this recapitalisation (of the op-co) has been put in place. In a game with many rounds, such as chess, the expert players are those that are trained to think many steps ahead. Within the bail-in process, the (main) operating subsidiary (the op-co) is meant to continue, so this is supposed to be a multi-stage exercise. Yet nothing is said in this paper about subsequent stages, nor the problems that might arise therein. I raise some queries about what might happen after the initial resolution is triggered.

Read the whole thing for specifics. Pointer from Mark Thoma.

SPOE stands for Single Point of Entry, which I think relates to what Goodhart calls TLAC. My hypothesis is that the regulators will start to look one step ahead just when the first big bank failure occurs, and what they see will convince them to do a bailout instead.

The Threat of Debt

Luigi Buttiglione, Philip R. Lane, Lucrezia Reichlin and Vincent Reinhart write,

Contrary to widely held beliefs, the world has not yet begun to delever and the global debt-to-GDP is still growing, breaking new highs. At the same time, in a poisonous combination, world growth and inflation are also lower than previously expected, also – though not only – as a legacy of the past crisis. Deleveraging and slower nominal growth are in many cases interacting in a vicious loop, with the latter making the deleveraging process harder and the former exacerbating the economic slowdown. Moreover, the global capacity to take on debt has been reduced through the combination of slower expansion in real output and lower inflation.

Much of the debt increase has taken place in emerging markets, notably China. I remain suspicious of aggregate debt-to-GDP numbers as an indicator. Indeed, the paper speaks to many of the issues with this measure that trouble me). However, the authors make a reasonable case to worry about two risks. One is that any adverse economic development will be multiplied by the defaults that result from high leverage. The other is that a “confidence crisis,” in which creditors lose faith in some debt instruments, becomes self-fulfilling. As the authors put it,

we outline the nature of the leverage cycle, a pattern repeated across economies and over time in which a reasonable enthusiasm about economic growth becomes overblown, fostering the belief that there is a greater capacity to take on debt than is actually the case. A financial crisis represents the shock of recognition of this over-borrowing and over-lending, with implications for output very different from a ‘normal’ recession. Second, we explain the theoretical foundations of debt capacity limits. Debt capacity represents the resources available to fund current and future spending and to repay current outstanding debt. Estimates of debt capacity crucially depend on beliefs about future potential output and can be quite sensitive to revisions in these expectations.

This report came out two months ago, and I do not recall it getting much play. I think it deserves your attention. Read the whole thing. For the pointer I thank Jon Mauldin’s email newsletter.